How Care Net Grew their Web Traffic by 91% Year-Over-Year Using Multi-Channel Marketing

Since 1975, Care Net has been working to help women and men find realistic alternatives to abortion so that they choose life for their unborn children and abundant life for their families. It’s their mission to provide compassion, hope, and help to people facing pregnancy decisions.

The Problem

There are three key metrics that directly influence an organization’s revenue:

Web Traffic

Conversion Rate

Average Gift Size

When we can lift one of these metrics while maintaining the others, revenue goes up. And if we can lift them all, we can grow our revenue exponentially.

In this case, Care Net had a significant amount of traffic coming to their website already. But in order to grow their impact, they wanted to find a way to lift their web traffic while maintaining their conversion rate. Traffic is often easy to come by if you have a big enough budget, but the biggest difficulty is getting more of the right traffic.

In this case, Care Net needed to find a way to drive more people to their website without causing their lead conversion to drop.

The Plan

The first step in developing their plan was identifying what the right traffic looks like. In their case, they wanted to attract more people that were interested in the pro-life movement.

Now, it’s only in the rarest of cases that an organization finds the silver bullet content offer, blog post, viral video, etc. that sends their web traffic off the charts. This sort of growth is nearly impossible to plan for or create intentionally.

Care Net looked across all of their channels and content to devise an inbound content strategy that would attract the right people and capture them as leads while on the site. They invested in creating regular and consistent content that was of high value to people interested in the pro-life movement. They wrote blog posts that covered the latest headlines, and they developed eBooks that provided training on how to communicate the message of life to those considering an abortion.

They developed PPC, display, and Facebook ads that featured these various content offers. They also utilized slide-in offers, exit-intent offers, and other on-site calls-to-action to capture leads from their inbound traffic.

And finally, they began A/B testing their landing pages in order to optimize their conversion rates and make the most of the new traffic they were bringing in.

The Results

But as we said, a key part of the success of a web traffic campaign is maintaining your conversion rate. Care Net not only maintained their lead conversion rate, but actually saw it increase from 2.06% to 3.6% – that’s a 75% lift in conversion rate!

The combination of a lift in web traffic and a lift in conversion rate led to a 235% increase in new contacts added to Care Net’s email file. We see time and time again that the size of an organization’s email file is one of the key indicators of their online fundraising success. An increase in email acquisition this large should lead to significant returns in donations downstream.

The Learning

One of the most important things to note about this campaign is that every aspect is something that can be recreated at virtually any organization. Now, the message and the content will vary from organization to organization. And the budgets to spend on the various tactics will fluctuate.

But none of the tools used are exclusive to big-budget organizations. You don’t need big teams of developers, designers, copywriters, and creative staff to create the various campaign assets.

Too often organizations will get caught up trying to create one big and innovative campaign. We’ll get so focused trying to figure out how to create the perfect email welcome series, eBook, or other content offer – all the while neglecting the basic blocking-and-tackling that can yield major results.

We gave Care Net a 2017 Nonprofit Innovation & Optimization Award for this very reason. They were able to orient their marketing efforts around a singular goal, and systematically build an inbound marketing machine that it is generating significant results and growing their impact.

About the author:

Nathan is the Marketing Director for NextAfter. He spends every day working to help nonprofit organizations discover how testing and optimization can transform their marketing and fundraising, leading to greater impact and organizational growth. He is also a giant Star Wars nerd.